Listening to the pandemic-powered pipe-dreams of Australia’s fossil fuel industry
Here’s the secret to decoding the intentions of advocates of climate inaction: just listen.
No, that’s it. That’s all there is to it. Have you seen, for instance, that gas is only a temporary stop-gap to help the transition to renewable energy before batteries and interconnection get built? Well, you can learn more simply by listening.
Head of the National Covid Coordination Commission (NCCC) and mining executive Neville Power suggested building a pipeline across Australia to transport gas from fields in Western Australia to the populous eastern states. “A pipeline is a permanent and low cost long-term solution”, Power declared last September.
There you have it. A permanent transition fuel. A pipe dream to lock Australia into fossil fuels for the long term, declared simply and openly.
I am very interested in this pipeline. It is not the main story of climate change in Australia this year, but I think it is a simple metaphor for efforts to increase the extraction and burning of fossil fuels as a response to the COVID19 crisis. Let’s take a look inside.
Wait, what pipeline?
Australia has three big gas markets. Bloomberg visualised it as such in 2017:
That report refers to a push in 2017 to build a pipeline connecting west to east. “It is not acceptable for Australia to be the world’s largest exporter of LNG and, yet, to have a gas shortage on the east coast in its domestic market” then PM Malcolm Turnbull said.
Only a few months after South Australia’s state-wide blackout, talk of an “energy crisis” became locked into discourse. “How can it be that a country so rich in energy resources can be held back by blackouts”, former Western Australia Premier Colin Barnett said, a few years later.
The idea is far older than four years.
“Life is an equation of hydrocarbons”, said Rex Connor, former Minister for Minerals and Energy in the Whitlam government, in the 1970s. He became one of the first key proponents of a trans-Australian gas pipeline.
“The pipeline grid and spur lines to regional centres were to be part of a national energy strategy combining natural gas, petroleum, brown coal, solar power and uranium”, wrote historian Norman Abjorensen. “I have every confidence the project will go ahead — and I hope very quickly”, said Deputy Prime Minister Doug Anthony in 1976. It never came about because by the 1980s “nation-building was no longer on the agenda, economic nationalism was unfashionable”.
Between the 1970s and now, the pipeline has come up frequently. “Though a trans-Australia pipeline was not economically justifiable at present, it might become the answer in the 1990s”, wrote one article in the mid 1980s.
You can guess what happens in the 1990s. No pipeline. And so on. It keeps being put forward — often with the support of subsidies and government underwriting of loans — as a pathway to increasing the extraction and burning of fossil gas. And it keeps being knocked back.
Is the pipeline a good idea?
Any infrastructure that enables the extraction of fossil fuels is a bad idea, in 2020. Gas, in particular, is the fastest-growing emissions intensive fuel in the world. It is not needed for the integration of wind and solar. It is emissions intensive. We need to stop burning fossil fuels. Halfway isn’t good enough.
From an economic perspective, the Australian government ordered a little-known feasibility study from consultancy ACIL Allen into this trans-continential pipeline concept, delivered in 2019. “It found the high cost of a pipeline and the rapid changes underway in energy markets presented unacceptable risk for a government to underwrite”, wrote the ABC.
Buried in that report is a forecast that highlight gas for the generation of electricity is only a small fraction of total gas consumption in the next two decades:
The argument that gas is needed to balance variable renewable energy is false, but even putting that aside, it is only 20% of total, in ACIL Allen’s ‘base case’ model for east coast consumption. Most would be directed to commercial and residential use (indoor cooking with a gas stove has been recently revealed to have detrimental health impacts). Gas burnt to cook chicken in Australia’s kitchens isn’t a ‘transition’ to anything besides a detectably shorter life.
In that same ABC article, Dr Robert Aguilera of Curtin University says Australia will rely on gas for “many decades”, and that the pipeline “makes the Snowy Scheme seem like small economics, because this is power for 50 to 100 years”. The ACIL Allen study estimates between 20 to 30 years operation, which takes it nicely to the point at which Australia is meant to be at net zero emissions, in 2050.
The pipeline concept is telling us something very important, and all we have to do is listen: the NCCC’s gas-fired efforts exist to lock Australia into a fossil-fuelled future, using public money. Gas is only a ‘transition’ fuel in that grids are transitioning from relentlessly coal-soaked to relentlessly gas-soaked.
The power of the pipe dream
In a sense, this mythical pipeline represents something broad and important about the ‘gas fired recovery’. The ideas are bad, risky to taxpayers, verifiably harmful to human habitat through climate impacts and have been on the wishlist of fossil fuel companies for decades.
A leaked report from the NCCC’s ‘manufacturing taskforce’ suggests that the trans-Australia pipeline receive taxpayer subsidies to be built, along with a range of direct public subsidies for other gas projects.
The leaked report doesn’t just praise pipelines — it praises cheaper gas. That is not something welcomed by the industry, and it’s caused a rift between the NCCC and the companies and lobby groups trying to secure
“$4 a gigajoule gas is impossible”, Senex’ Ian Davies said. Origin energy, MST Energy, Weston Energy and gas lobby group APPEA all warned the Australian Financial Review against subsidising gas pipelines and pushing gas price down low. These companies very much rather have their untapped gas fields, like the Beetaloo Basin, approved and unlocked through rapid regulatory rollbacks.
What’s happening here is an argument over the best methodology for subsidising fossil fuels. This is no good thing. It’s not a ‘let them fight’ moment.
Whether it happens by heavily subsidised gas pipeline, heavily subsidised gas mining or heavily subsidised new gas-fired power stations, the mission of the NCCC is to actively increase Australia’s reliance on fossil fuels, and to damage its already-bad climate trajectory even further.
It is amazingly brazen, and it is amazing what you discover when you simply approach this by listening to what they say. The message is clear: the only way out of coronavirus is through the burning of fossil fuels.
